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Interview with Beryl Fletcher
Beryl Fletcher is a New Zealand writer engaged in writing a trilogy about the lives and concerns of a group of feminist women over a period of years. The first novel of the trilogy, and Fletcher's first published novel, was The Word Burners, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book South Asia/South Pacific for 1992. It is the story of two sisters, Julia and Isobel, and of their widowed mother, Sally. The setting is mainly that of women's studies in a university framework. The second, The Iron Mouth, appeared in 1993, and has been well received in New Zealand. It is an ambitious attempt to rewrite The Iliad in a modern New Zealand setting. The third novel is due for publication in July 1995. Beryl is interviewed here by Laurel Bergmann.
Would you like to begin by talking about your background?
I was born in 1938 into a poor, working class family. We lived in what we call "State Houses" here (the houses people rent when they haven't got much money) in a big housing development on the outskirts of Auckland. My father was very left-wing, a socialist -- although he never joined the New Zealand Communist Party, he was very sympathetic to its causes. I have clear memories of sitting on his lap while he read aloud passages from Marx's Das Kapital. He was a working man all his life, and my mother was a traditional housewife with five kids. Where I was brought up I never saw women going out to work.
Your education, then?
I went to high school, and left when I was sixteen. We had to leave school, we couldn't really keep going because of the lack of money. In fact, for the last two years I worked all weekend at a local shop. I put myself through school because, although my father was never out of work, we really didn't have any money.
So you were expected to contribute to the family income as early as possible?
Yes, we had to. We didn't have a car, or anything like that -- we didn't have any `things' the way people do now. I really like that, actually!
What happened after that, you worked...